Citrix

Duo Security provides a rich identity management and authentication platform and it is commonly used to enable multi-factor authentication in enterprise networks. Duo is very flexible and has examples for integrating with NetScaler here – you will see that there are two different configuration examples: one for using the Duo auth proxy service to do AD authentication as well as additional factors, and a second for using the Duo service to do just MFA. Both of … Read more…

I started my professional technology career as a help desk administrator supporting a small healthcare organization that was still using something that was called Citrix Metaframe XP – it was the first time I had dealt with a real IT infrastructure, and also the first time I interacted with a Citrix product. That was nearly 13 years ago. After that, I interacted with Metaframe and XenApp (among other products) on and off until I started … Read more…

I’ve been talking and working a LOT with NetScaler SD-WAN lately – and I noticed that my first post (here) still has the name of Cloudbridge VWAN. If you don’t know what it is, the best way to explain it is with a short video. It’s cutting edge technology for your WAN!! So to make things right, and add to the previous post – I’ll be covering how to build a simple, initial SD-WAN configuration for … Read more…

Ever wish that you could just block all network traffic from known bad IP addresses? When you start to think about the logistics of this, it would be nice if you didn’t have to manage it either. If you have NetScaler Platinum, you’ve got both of your wishes – and as an added bonus, it’s free! That’s right, if you have a NetScaler Platinum appliance and you are running build 11.0 or later, you have an … Read more…

*Note: This is not officially supported – do this at your own risk.* Sometimes, virtual appliances or other random VMs in your lab need a simple, widely supported NIC and just wont boot (or install) without one. XenServer uses a Realtek RTL8139 10/100 card when you don’t have integration services installed. This is usually not an issue…but it certainly can be. In older versions of XenServer, there was a patch available as mentioned in this … Read more…

While I was rebuilding my lab, I ran into an issue when building out my demo Exchange OWA front-ended by NetScaler – the error was pretty generic, I would attempt to access the OWA page, was then prompted for authentication by the NetScaler AAA engine running as a part of Unified Gateway, then I was dumped to the following error page: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable – /cgi/selfauth/xxxxx This error page is being presented by the NetScaler, … Read more…

Is Citrix Secure Gateway really End of Life? Not really…it’s tied to the lifecycle of the latest product that it was released with which would be XenApp 6.5 – which is incidentally the last product that it works with. Secure Gateway also does not work with any version of StoreFront, so you’re stuck with Web Interface. What does secure gateway do? It allows for an SSL connection to XenApp and XenDesktop resources to be proxied from … Read more…

Is your database application not performing as well as it should? Is your SQL Server running low on resources? Is your application not written to take advantage of SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups or database sharding? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then NetScaler Datastream to the rescue! Or, maybe you are looking to demo NetScaler Datastream to get a better idea of what capabilities it has in your SQL environment. If that is … Read more…

Earlier this month I completely re-worked my homelab – with both storage and hardware upgrades as well as the underlying hypervisors. If you’re interested in the changes made, see this post here. So how has the experience with the new gear been? In no particular order, here’s my notes: Miscellaneous Not having to burn 8+GB for a vCenter VM is nice – especially for a lab XenCenter console is far simpler and less of a resource … Read more…

Take a look at the #HomeLab hashtag on twitter, and you will see lots of technology experts that have some pretty extensive lab environments at home – add me to that list. OK I’ve been on that list for a while…my lab has gone through numerous iterations: Started with Hyper-V initial release (2008 – KB950050) Ran StarWind Virtual SAN for a while – great performance offloading cache to RAM Moved away from local storage to SAN\NAS … Read more…

About the Author

Jacob 'Jake' Rutski works for Citrix on the Channel Architecture team. He holds several certifications from many technology vendors; and while all Citrix products are the majority of his focus, he does enjoy all things tech, automation, and storage - including FreeNAS\ZFS - and has been scripting everything in PowerShell lately...instead of VBScript. The content in this blog represent individual views, not those of Citrix